Photo by mr. dr. M.M. Helmich.
All things considered, I am no Aristotle, but not for lack of trying. I was born and raised in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In 2010, I graduated from Leiden University with two “doctorandus” degrees (the last of their kind). One of these is in Classics, and luckily trained me to treat “doctorandus” primarily as a Latin gerundive, a verbal adjective of sorts, best translated into English as “he who should become a doctor” (I think). Yet it was only after I had moved out of Bloomington, Indiana in 2019 with a doctoral degree in Political Science that I derived its ultimate implication – that my Dutch alma mater had instructed me to become a doctor not once, but twice. When I’m not scrolling through the dinosaur wiki pages, I spend most of my free time either pondering what to have for lunch (mostly Lunchables) or writing my autobiography, but not until sinking my teeth into the day’s first muffin. I am an avid listener to BBC Radio 4 and liked my first year in grad school. I actually liked high school. My first name (Wynand) is pronounced “Wynand” and means “struggle-brave” in Gothic, which sounds like an obvious reference to my first (and final) attempt at putting a straw in a Capri Sun. That is all.